This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
I'm entitled opinions began airing 10 years ago believe it or not and we're keeping it going here on KZSU for all you listeners.
Who rely on it as a kind of intellectual lifeline.
We don't know how many of you are out there and we don't know if all of you are even alive.
There are those who believe that radio is a spirit medium that can reach through to the other side and that the dead are attuned to some of its frequencies.
I'm down with that, it doesn't spook me in the least.
I wouldn't air a show that I wouldn't air if I knew for a fact that the dead were listening in.
That goes even for today's show which is devoted to the Austrian-born eccentric Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who many consider the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
I don't share their opinion personally but I'll confess it's a little unnerving to imagine that Wittgenstein's ghost might be tuning into our program.
He was a severe judgmental and at times nasty human being and there's no reason to think he's changed much in his afterlife.
But that's all right we can handle Wittgenstein on entitled opinions.
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The song is Echo, the band is Glassway.
KZSU is best.
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It's a real pleasure to welcome back to entitled opinions, my friend and colleague Hans Sluga,
whom you may remember from the show he and I did on Michel Foucault a few years back.
April 18, 2012 to be exact.
Hans Sluga is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley,
author of several outstanding books and will be posting his full bio on our website.
But let me mention here only his two most recent publications.
One is on Wittgenstein called Wittgenstein, brought out by Wiley Blackwell in 2011.
The other goes by the title politics and the search for the common good.
That one came out in 2014 with Cambridge University Press.
These are two major books and what we've decided to do is to devote one show to each of them.
Today Professor Sluga will share with us his eminently entitled opinion about Wittgenstein,
the person, the philosopher and the ethical thinker.
We'll follow up with him very soon with another show about his fascinating new book politics and the search for the common good.
We have a lot of ground to cover with my guests, so let me welcome him to the show without further delay.
Hans is great to have you back on entitled opinions.
Thanks for coming down from the North Bay to join us here on KZSU.
Thank you all about for this generous introduction.
It's great to be back and I remember our wonderful discussion of Foucault.
I hope we can do the same with Wittgenstein.
Yes, one of the very popular shows of entitled opinions.
So let me begin by saying that Wittgenstein's personality was as complex as his philosophy and your book deals admirably,
really, in a way that I admire greatly with Wittgenstein, the philosopher, tracing with great lucidity, the meandering,
but steady course that his thinking followed from around 1911, 1912 until his death in 1951.
And in this show we'll have time to deal with only a few aspects of his thinking and also I hope a few aspects of his personality if we get a chance.
But let me begin with a broad question that you should feel free to take in whatever direction you want.
So when we did our show on Foucault, I quoted from your faculty webpage where you wrote the following.
I quote, "My overall philosophical outlook is radically historicist.
I believe that we can understand ourselves only as beings with a particular evolution and history.
For this reason I have been drawn to the work of Nietzsche and Foucault.
I am doubtful of the possibility of a pure a priori philosophizing in consequence.
I feel attracted to a realist and naturalistic view of things rather than any sort of formalistic rationalism."
So my question for you, Wittgenstein was anything but a historicist thinker, Alainicha Rifugault,
nor am I convinced that he had a realist or naturalistic view of things yet you seem to be fascinated with him.
Why?
Well, that's a great question to start with. In fact, you don't know how great the question is.
I am just in the process of doing a second edition of the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein,
which I and my student David Stern edited and published 50 years ago already.
One of the most popular best-selling Cambridge companions of all, no?
Yes, it's been extremely successful and so the publisher wants us to do a second edition.
I took one of my own contribution out of the old edition and I'm writing now a piece called "Time and History in Wittgenstein".
It's a theme that hardly anybody has thought about very systematically and that seems to me nevertheless not surprisingly for my perspective, of course, of great importance.
So the point is that he starts off really not thinking about time at all in the Troctatus' first work.
There's hardly reference to time and history doesn't get mentioned at all in this work.
There is a wonderful sentence from the notebooks from which he extracted the Troctatus, 1916 in which he writes,
"What has history to do with me mine is the first and only world?"
And it's paradoxical and strange, of course he is a soldier in the war.
It's fighting in a great historical battle so what does this mean.
But I think the Troctatus represents that kind of worldview.
It's a kind of detached, timeless perspective on a world of static facts and their timeless logical relations roughly.
But he gets away from this and that's what fascinates me.
He gets beyond that point and there are really two important steps I think.
One of them is that instead of thinking about language as a system of representation,
he begins to think about it as a system of use and communication.
And he's quite clear, use and communication takes place in time.
So time becomes an essential category in his thinking about language.
And that is projected also into other areas like logic and mathematics.
He says, "We must give up thinking about mathematics as this crystalline-timeless structure
and think instead of actual processes of calculation and transformation and transition in mathematics."
So the first point is, use is meaning is use.
Second one is that he reads Osboch Beggler's famous and notorious book, The Decline of the West in the late 1920s.
And it opens his eyes to history.
And it's a picture of history where the historical process is divided,
divides into different cultures and periods.
Ages, each one has its own structure to it.
Culture proceeds from primitive beginnings to hardening to civilization.
And there are discrete and disjoment forms of culture.
So this cultural pluralism in historicism becomes greatly important for him.
It's something that he thinks through but comes to understand fully only very late in life in the late 1940s
in notes called uncertainty.
This picture of our understanding of the world as historical, as consisting of different world views,
which each has their own history and their own background,
that's something that he slowly develops.
So I want to say he's less an anti-estarist thinker than you suggest.
And the picture of these world views is a naturalistic one rather than a rationalistic and formalist one.
That's now we're talking about the later victim style of the world.
Later victim style.
Yeah, of course.
So before we trace the difference between the earlier or the later of maybe the middle,
even though in the early period in the tractate, he doesn't mention history,
time is not really the concern.
Nevertheless, he did live through some very important historical moment and was a soldier during the First World War.
He was also, as you've point out so persuasively in your book that he was paragmatic of his own historical time.
Can we first maybe...
Can you tell us something about how you see him as being so much belonging to his particular historical moment?
So when I look at the picture literature today, then I'm struck by how very, veryiable and various it is.
I mean, it's not only for philosophers who write about Wittgenstein, but cultural critics, cultural historians, people concerned with literature and music.
And in particular, of course, the history of late, the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and of Foreign de Sierco Vienna.
Wittgenstein was very much part of this cultural milieu, so was born in 1889.
And he grew up with people like Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud,
Adolf Loes, the architect, Karl Kraus, the critic of culture, and so on.
And so on.
So Vienna was a very small world, and everybody knew everybody, and the Wittgenstein was very much part of this environment.
And so he reflects many of the attitudes.
For instance, this attraction has to show up in our... something that's deeply Viennese at the time.
This pessimism, what culture, something very Viennese.
And at the same time, this modernism that also appears in the work of Schoenberg and Mahler and Adolf Loes and Klimt, that too is very Viennese.
And so he represents this combination of this pessimistic look backwards to a world that is falling apart, but also a concern with a new world, modern world, which is one of logic and rationality and technology.
And indeed, his pessimism was quite extreme.
He believed that Europe was going into a dark age.
He believed that they're... well, I'm thinking now of a book of his was called Philosophical Remarks,
where maybe it was as a result, as you mentioned, of reading Spangler and the decline of the West,
but he has a preface there, and you draw attention to it in your book, where he says about philosophical remarks.
This book was written for such men as our Incympathy with its spirit.
This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand.
That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement in building ever larger and more complicated structures.
The other, let me his spirit, in striving after clarity and perspicuity in matters, in no matter what structure.
And then he goes on to say that the first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery and its variety, the second at its center in its essence.
So here he does seem to have a sense that European American civilization has been a long stream, and there's a kind of long history that adds layers and layers of complexity,
and that in a certain sense maybe his essentialistic thinking is trying to be the counter movement to that, to get back to a certain kind of clarity and simplicity that certainly characteristic of his early work and probably even his later work.
Yes, and so this sentiment gets repeated of course in the preface to the better non-full philosophical investigations where he says it's possible that his work will help to illuminate his time, but it's unlikely given the darkness of the time.
So he gets back again to this idea of the dark times in which we are living.
Yes, this pessimism is very powerful, but of course many philosophers ignore all this as a kind of sentiment surrounding the actual work and the concentrate on the formal aspects of the work.
So what he says about logic or language and meaning and forget about these cultural backgrounds that of cultural kind of motivations that we really get him going.
Do you see strong parallels if not convergences between something like the tractatus, the early work and the architectural, I don't know what the technical term for it is, but it would say architectural minimalism of Alfred Belose, for example.
And, you know, Bitcoin's sign himself got was involved in building a house there in Vienna with Engleman and was a student of Alfred Belose.
And there seems to be remarkable parallels between the two structures.
As Lose is certainly a very important figure in his life, he's a full runner of a house architecture and therefore of American modernist architecture, of course as well.
And he meets Lose, I forget exactly what the circumstances, he gets to know him personally and they kind of talk to each other, they write to each other, and there is this moment when Lose says you and me are the same.
And he's that because both of them were trying to get back to the essential, get away from ornamentation and almost not the atomic that would be Bitcoin science word, but the formalistic purity of in one case architecture and the other case formal logic.
Yes, there are certain kind of aesthetics they share, right? They made that the beautiful must manifest itself not in decoration attached to the front of the facades of houses, but it must express itself in the structural forms, in the relationships of the forms to each other.
And I think the talk to others wants to kind of elaborate that kind of an instantiate that kind of aesthetics as well. It's a work of literature as well as philosophy.
Well, let me say a little bit about my frustration with Bitcoin sign over many, many years where he just seems to me the archetype of the philosopher, he seems to fit into the notion of someone who inherited a great sum of money because his family was one of the richest families in Europe.
He gives it all away artists and other, and there are many periods in his life when he lived almost in a monkish way, gardening school teacher.
It seems like he embodied a wisdom, a philosophical understanding that is beyond me, and for years I've been trying to follow this promise that if I stick with him long enough, he's going to deliver some rich insight or some feast of the kind of things that he's going to deliver.
The wisdom or knowledge, but I've come to the conclusion that if there is such a feast, it's just not for me because I always come away from him hungry, whether it's the early Bitcoin sign or the later one.
It's because there's something about the austere, let's say, straight jacket that he begins with in philosophical.
That also has parallels with the house that he built in Vienna.
Let me quote what he said about his own house. He didn't sign the whole house. He only was responsible for certain aspects of it.
He says the house I built for Gretel is the product of a decisively sensitive ear and good manners and expression of great understanding, but primordial life, wild life starving to erupt into the open that is lacking.
It's that lack that he senses in his own house that I often sense when I read both the early Bitcoin sign above all, but sometimes also even the later philosophical investigation, not so with culture and value when he's speaking about religion and other things different.
Do you have a certain frustration with what I would call this overly inhibited manner of doing philosophy for those of us who are used to, for example, reading high-degenerable sats or the phenomenological tradition where they let it rip a little bit more?
Yes, I mean the austerity of Bitcoin-shats prose, of his thinking, of his lifestyle, both astonishing and frightening, I think, sometimes.
I'm almost ambiguous about this. I feel I'm a much more baroque personality. I'm open to lots of influences, lots of ideas, a much more dynamic way of seeing the world and wanting to see the world in dynamic terms.
But I think he represents a certain kind of thinking that is characteristic of a great deal of loss-fising.
He is, as I said, a kind of paradigmatic thinker of modernism, high modernism. I compare him to artists like Malavich, Kandinsky, the formalistic Kandinsky that is, or Mondrian.
I mean this idea of the reduction of aesthetic forms to simple straight lines and plain surfaces. That is something that appeals to him. He was broad, I was a Catholic, his family had a Jewish background.
But there is something very Protestant in the modernist Protestant way to this way of thinking.
Do I find this problematic? I never let us think. It tells us something about who we are in our own century and our own time. That's what's really really about it.
For sure. So can I ask a few follow-up questions on number one, "Shopenhauer"?
I was very impressed and convinced by what you write in your book that "Shopenhauer" was an influence on him all the way to the end.
And that he never, even though he had some critical remarks about "Shopenhauer" later, that the philosophical pessimism of "Shopenhauer" stays with him.
But also, "Shopenhauer" in the world is will and representation, making this distinction between what can be said and then something which is beyond language or beyond expression which would be associated with the aesthetic and the mystical.
And there is this drive towards the unsayable and the mystical already in the trek tatist, where of when can not speak there of, one should remain silent and that most of the things having to do with art and morality and so forth are beyond limits of representation,
whether it's formal, logical representation or other kinds of representation. And you see a strong, "Shopenhauer" in inheritance here.
That's certainly true. It's a point that hasn't been noted that much, but I think it's a key in some ways to understand it with "Shopenhauer" was very much widely read in "Late B&E's Culture".
He was of the philosopher that everybody had read. He also writes an extremely powerful and attractive prose. He's the teacher of nature in some ways, of course.
And, with which time we have heard, read as his first philosopher, "Shopenhauer".
In the 1930s, he gives us a list of the thinkers who have influenced him and "Shopenhauer" comes first.
When you read the truck tatist, you can see that if you have the eyes to look for it, of course, if you have read "Shopenhauer" himself.
And so the first sentence of the truck tatist is actually modeled on the first sentence of "Shopenhauer's Great Work, the World" as well in "representation" which "Shopenhauer" says, "The World" is my representation,
My idea, Wittgenstein says, "The World" is everything that is the case. This ambitious, over-embitious attempt to say something about the world as a whole and what it is is something unique and puzzling and that they share.
And they both end up taking back this initial proposition.
Wittgenstein says that, "Alto, what do we have to come with to see is propositions as senseless, we have to abandon them and where one cannot speak there of what must be silent, mystical silence ensues."
And this is exactly also where "Shopenhauer" ends up as well. He says, ultimately, it's the mistakes and their silence that we have to follow and we have to overcome these metaphysical incarnations.
We have to overcome the metaphysical world, as he puts it."
So do you believe that all that in the tractatus is beyond the limits of sensible, meaningful speech?
Was really Wittgenstein's primary concern, even though his logical atomism, if you want to call it, that for "bade him to speak of it?"
Well, I see a kind of developmental process in the tractatus, right? He reads "Shopenhauer" first before he really takes up philosophy seriously in a technical way.
Then he gets to know Russell. He works with Russell, and the early positive the tractatus kind of reflect a resilient ideas, very much in a resilient issues.
But we see from the notebooks how in the middle of the wall when he is composing the tractatus, he suddenly comes back to "Shopenhauer" in question about the meaning of life, and he quotes "Shopenhauer" at that point. He clearly re-reads them again at this point.
So I think there is a return from Russell and Freiger, the two great influences in this preceding period towards a back to "Shopenhauer."
And then he writes in 1929, he gives a lecture on ethics, which is one of the few pieces of writing which is deliberately devoted to ethics.
And there again, you think that "Shopenhauer" returns there in that essay, where "Shopenhauer" had written of the ambitions of philosophy that "to become practical to guide conduct, to deliver the kind of
transform character are old claims which, with mature insight, philosophy ought to finally abandon."
For here, what is a question of the worth or worthlessness of existence of salvation or damnation?
Not the dead concepts of philosophy decide the matter, but the innermost nature of man himself, the demon which guides him.
And you claim that that is how Wittgenstein ultimately understood the ethical as something that is inward and not normative.
It's not the Ten Commandments, it's not Kant's categorical imperative. It's not telling you what is how to act and what is right and what is wrong.
It's this sanctuary within a self that exists beyond the reach of the world of, let's say, the external world.
Yeah, so what I call "both "Shopenhauer and Wittgenstein's ethics" is a visionary ethics.
It's an attempt to see oneself and the world in a certain way, and that this one gives one an understanding of the meaning of one's existence.
That resolves the existential problem.
And so I think we should point out, of course, that "Shopenhauer" is the great forebear of Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche has an influence on the existential tradition.
In a certain way, the first existential philosopher was considerable in significance also for Heidegger.
So I see a sort of existentialist element in Wittgenstein's thinking appearing there through "Shopenhauer."
Well, it certainly seems very existential when, for example, when you quote, "I guess from his notebooks where he's in the trenches"
In World War I, saying, "I can die in one hour, I can die in two hours.
I can die in a month or only in a few years."
This seems very much like Heidegger's being under death, but in a very concrete situation.
And you write, "Living constantly under the gun, he is keenly aware that he may have no future ahead of him, and therefore he concludes, "Man must not depend on accident, neither on the favorable nor the unfavorable."
So then his question becomes, you say, "How must I live in order to persist at every moment, to live in the good and the beautiful and till life ends by itself?"
And this is what the ethical amounts to, in a sense, for Wittgenstein, because as he goes on to say, his own ethical experience is that of wonder at the existence of the world.
It's also the experience of this is, I'm intrigued by, feeling, absolutely safe, whatever may happen.
And finally, the experience of feeling guilty, not because of anything one is done, but absolutely an existentially guilty in the face of God.
So this would seem to put ethics in a very different sphere than one normally associates it with.
Not in the sphere of normative behavior and right and wrong, but this inward place of the self where one's being in the world takes on its own form.
Yes. So if one thinks of these three examples of the ethical that he gives in this lecture, one certainly wants to say, these are religious attitudes that I expressed there.
And the wonder of the world is thinking about creation, the creation of the world out of nothing, out of Xneelo, being completely safe is the salvation he talks about.
Yes, I think that he is talking about salvation and feeling guilty, whatever one does is original sin.
These are, I want to say not only Christian, but deeply Catholic sentiments he expresses in this fashion here.
Yeah, it's so good because we're seeing oneself in relation to the world as a whole.
That's what ethics is really about and thereby finding a meaning in one's life.
I was tempted to read that thing about feeling absolutely safe as if I can in these trenches with all the bombs going around.
If I can achieve clarity about life, about the limits of language, if I can get to this fill, if I can resolve the philosophical quandaries that have been afflicting me and the history of metaphor, then I can feel completely safe because I achieved what he calls that clarity and persecuity that he speaks about in the preface.
But I think now you've persuaded me that he's probably talking about the absolute safety of salvation, whatever would happen.
Yes, so in this, what I've known about books becomes clear that he's also quite strongly drawn on Tolstoy and Tolstoy's Christianity.
And there the word safe is sometimes replaced by the word saved.
Saved.
I'm saved in the way.
So Christians always saved by this confidence in salvation.
And then there's that feeling of guilt.
Yes.
The absolute guilt is almost like primordial guilt.
Do you think that Wittgenstein suffered greatly from a sense of guilt for which behavior was not the issue?
It was just almost like existential ontological condition.
Yes, definitely, but he's not the only one who suffers from this.
It's deeply built into the Christian ideology.
And it's also even more strongly something felt by Viennese people in the late 19th century.
It leads throughout, to signify this feeling of anxiety, this neurotic sense as a deeply profoundly human phenomenon that needs treatment.
So it's no accident that there is a connection between Freud and Wittgenstein.
He calls himself at some point a student and disciple of Freud even.
Right.
He rejects Freud's theories, he thinks Freud's conception of the self as sort of always in a state of anxiety and needing to be released from that is precisely what human life and what philosophy is about.
So if we can move on to some of the fundamental concepts of the philosophical investigations, which is the latter part of his career, in our philosophical reading group, which has been going on at Stanford for a long time, when Dick Rowdy was still alive, we had a reading group on the philosophical investigations.
And many of us, nourished on the continental tradition, existentialism, said, we were trying to figure out what the big deal was in the philosophical investigations that it didn't seem either to be so surprising what Wittgenstein was pursuing to discover, nor particularly interesting.
And Richard Rowdy said, if you haven't suffered from the disease, then you don't need the cure.
But many of us who were nourished in the analytic philosophical tradition caught that disease, which is believing that language and logic were, as Wittgenstein had described in the tractatus, and therefore Wittgenstein needed to be cured from his earlier misconceptions.
But I suppose I find it hard-seen language, and when he says the world is all that is the case, my hydrogarions, and he says, "What do you mean by world? What does being in a world mean? And is there a world without design? Is there an oomveld surrounding world? Is there also a larger cause?"
Do you agree that the philosophical investigations have their most value in terms of a therapy for those who are sympathetic with the kind of philosophy that the tractatus is a great manifesto or testimony?
You can certainly say that the book is first of all a kind of self-diagnosis, right? He's looking back at his own early reviews and now taking the part and trying to show what was wrong with him.
But the views of language and meaning and language as a system of representation with a very precisely defined deep structure which we must bring and can bring out is a picture of language that is still very much around.
So he's not only a diagnostic himself, not only diagnosing a philosophical view held by people like Frager and Russell earlier on and earlier self, but it's also one which is still deeply embedded in our culture.
So I would say what he is attacking is for instance a picture of language as it has been developed by Norm Chomsky more recently and there are many linguists who hold that the Chomsky picture of there being deep structures which we can identify maybe universal deep structures in language is still very much around.
Universal deep structures is a language I cannot take very seriously is the correspondence theory of truth that you have in the tractatus where you have propositions that have to have the same logical form as the facts that they represent and the facts are things in the world, events in the world can catch nations.
And for me I think in 1912 I was reading there was a Cambridge moral sciences club and Wittgenstein gave a four minute paper in 1912 where he defined philosophy and I'm quoting all those primitive propositions which are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences.
And I say to myself oh my that's for me applies so well to the tractatus you get all these propositions that are stated apodictically and they are told and not shown and they don't seem to have any proof for he doesn't feel under the obligation to prove any of them.
So the question you're absolutely right that many philosophers academic philosophers of our own time are still caught up in the in the in the view that you get in the picture theory of meaning and so forth.
Why have they not been persuaded by reading the philosophical investigations that they are utterly wrong about that.
So that's a very good question for which I really don't have a full answer what is I think what shows itself above all is how strong our drive towards theory is right both in philosophy and outside philosophy.
We obviously there must be somewhere even if we haven't got it right now there must be somewhere a complete comprehensive theory of everything and that's what we are striving for and what Wittgenstein the later Wittgenstein tries to convince us of that's a mistake right.
What we have indeed instead is a world in which we live with certain human practices which we have acquired in a completely natural and historical fashion and we maneuver and manage more or less adequately in there and sometimes that expresses itself in some theory in bit of theory but the assumption that there is a theory for everything is a mistake and a mistake that he felt he was himself engaged in in his earlier work.
So he says very interesting things about the drug tardis later on he says firstly it's a piece of complete dogmatism.
Everything is a dogmatic assertion in it.
Second he said every proposition that it is like the heading of a title of a chapter in other words it doesn't spell out any details it just puts very large claims before as it leaves them there and the third one is the mostly tree one he said every one of the propositions is the symptom of a disease.
So he completely abandoned all this and tried to fashion a completely new form of thinking and of course he was convinced that he got to the later thinking only by having gone through the fire of this earlier philosophizing.
Because the later thinking conceives of itself as a therapy.
Not changing the world but but as a cure a healing process.
That's where Freud comes into that's where he takes this metaphor of the therapeutic from right so in Freud we are we have certain neurotic feelings and the analyst helps us to describe them to identify them and thereby they dissolve they maybe get displaced and you
you know you wrote as a PSM or else they need them to be described and analyzed and so the picture of the philosopher now becomes someone likes this he is concerned with philosophical confusions and trying to therapeutically dissolve these confusions which however may manifest themselves in new ways in some other place.
So he was very much against theory and he did do a lot to dismantle theories to get back to the essence so deconstruction would be the wrong word to use in his in his.
I'm perfectly happy to to call him I am to say the truck status isn't some sense already the first deconstructive piece of philosophy.
Yeah because I would say then that the what he says in the philosophical remark in the preface about having to get back to the center and go against the current of a European American civilization which has constructed more and more complex structures.
And that philosophy philosophical theories metaphysical theories need to also be dismantled and get back where he says that philosophy has to return to the center of our true needs to get back to this essence and that would involve a kind of deconstruction of.
And clarification of the way we use words so.
In that in that respect if you haven't again as Dick Roy said if you haven't suffered from the disease maybe you don't need that particular form of therapy although we do need philosophy.
I believe to get us back to the center of our true needs and what those true needs are he's not very.
He's not very let's say expansive but what I admire so much about your book is that your last chapter refuses just to give us an intelligent summary of the coherence of.
But you say well okay there are certain things there in this corpus that will have a great deal of relevance to something that bit can sign never engaged in himself which is the political.
You draw out the possible part of some of the main concepts of the philosophical investigations above all for what would amount to a project of a creative retrieval of Wittgenstein and a repurgation of his thinking in a new sphere.
And here these are concepts that have to do with his understanding of language what he means by a form of life.
What he means by a language game and the application of rules can you speak a little bit more about what you were up to in that final chapter of your book.
Yes, so let me begin with one for quote from one of his collaborators and friends Luke McVise one for the vice-man sorry.
And vice-man was a mathematician and he wanted to kind of write down in a systematic way of Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics.
And so they would get together every week and they would discuss the issue of vice-man would go home write it down bring it back to Wittgenstein and Richard Shabbat said no no wrong wrong wrong we have to start over again.
vice-man at the end said it was impossible to write this book because he tears everything down that he had previously built up.
I see Wittgenstein the whole Wittgenstein really very much in the light of this this idea.
I mean that he is a constantly reconstructive and but also deconstructive in destructive thinker.
And so for me learning from Wittgenstein doesn't mean to repeat and work out in more detail what he has already told us but rather to ask yourself what is the next step of destruction and construction.
That's the first thought the second one is what interest me in Wittgenstein is I think he's such a great singer like how to go or play or can't or they can't.
And so he is that he really wants to identify the deepest and most pressing problems that exist for him and battle with those.
And I want to say those problems that he worried about are no longer our deepest problems.
So the foundations of mathematics was a deep problem at the beginning of the 20th century because there was a crisis in mathematics that has long passed.
And we need to ask ourselves what are our deepest problems and these are really the problems of our social and political existence I say.
So we need to rethink Wittgenstein and what we can do what we can learn from him by looking at these questions.
And that's taking Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein in concept in a direction which of course he didn't at all anticipate and which however we maybe can do something new.
Yeah, but this is a heidegger's retrieval which is not repetition in the mechanical sense that you repeat I think or thought but you give it new life by bringing out potential future legacies of it.
And I agree with you that you are what you do in that last chapter is bring Wittgenstein sinking around the center of our true needs in our particular historical moment which is in the early 21st century where the political or namely how can we live with one another.
This is the crucial issue of our how can we all live together human beings with human beings but even human beings with nature and that's how I understand the political.
So could you get a little bit more specific when you discuss things like words or rules and how you think one can make that transfer into the political sphere.
So there are of course other people who have thought in this direction before me one of the mosquito winch who in late 1950s I think already wrote a book called the very idea of the social science.
And what he did was to use Wittgenstein's thinking about language and use and meaning as a critique of the idea of social science.
Our understanding of the social world can't be can't take the form of the scientific theory of the kind that we have in physics or chemistry.
I feel sympathetic to that so I also think that is one of which which does important contributions as a critic of this idea of scientific theory of society politics.
Then later there was David Blur, Scotsman who wrote about Wittgenstein and a social theory of knowledge seeing that our human understanding is in fact social phenomenon and has to be understood and interpreted in these ways.
And I think that is again right. And then my Berkeley colleague Hannah Pittkin wrote a book called Wittgenstein and justice in which he did already ask this question what can Wittgenstein tell us about politics and what she focused on was how he is so concerned with concepts that we take our concepts for granted.
We give him an essentialist interpretation we think that the essence we identify with and what we see is that these concepts have a much more complex structure and a complex use and there Wittgenstein can help us essentially in thinking about such issues.
Hannah Pittkin also she wrote this book about Wittgenstein she also wrote a book on the concept of representation and saying look we have this very simple minded idea of what is political representation but we need to kind of dissect this concept and this I think was done in a deeply Wittgensteinian spirit.
And you think Wittgenstein can help there specifically. Well certainly the idea of concepts as expressing family resemblance is an important one so I do want to say that there is no such thing as politics as politics has no single essence.
It's really a field of related activities and institutions and structures and people relating to each other in manifold ways and therefore there is also no such thing as the common good because how we understand the good in a particular situation will change because the nature of the political changes.
That's that leads over of course to my next book. Yes and we're going to talk about your textbook and the next installment because this last chapter actually is almost like a preface to the next book.
It was almost written as that actually was I was working at on both books at the same time.
But to remain within this last chapter of yours. You mentioned that between theory and practice it can be like the relationship between astronomy and the cosmos that maybe you can map something but no matter what we do in astronomy it was not going to change what so ever the.
Configuration of solar systems or galaxies or super clusters of galaxies. And that one of the problems in political theory is that is there any kind of theory that will have any efficacy as in terms of action within the political sphere.
So there the question would be that if Wittgenstein can help us clarify concepts and some confusion surrounding our concept of representation for example, or what we mean by the good or the common good or why the political is not just a.
It doesn't have an essence but it's a whole set of practices and life forms of life and language games and even if we gain the utmost clarity that we didn't have before would that still have any.
Direct intervention in the political itself or would we still be like astronomers mapping out something that exists on its own right.
Well, if Wittgenstein has anything to tell us about politics it would be at the methodological level how to think about it. But get me back let me get back to this this idea of astronomy versus social science right so this stars move quite independently of what series we have about them.
But when we look at the social world of course it turns out that the ways we see this social world is itself part of the social world.
Strange enough and therefore if our thinking it's changed changes about the social world that changes also the social reality itself so that's that's I think the idea lying behind the usefulness of such a bit good shiny analysis.
For sure, but here we can go back to the Wittgenstein's idea of a language game which is his way of naming a context a social.
Cultural context in which the use of words take on meaning and frankly we in academia.
We speak a language that is part of a language game it's one among a whole plurality of them.
And unfortunately often we just speak among ourselves because our words are not transitive no matter how much we may clarify for ourselves and complexify the notion of the political and representation and so forth.
Only rarely does it get beyond the walls of academia and and therefore I hear what you're saying that the way we think about something as a as a group actually changes the society that we live in.
But we might be changing will we be doing more than changing our own academic community and the way in which we use our language games here in academia or because that's what we're always frustrated by know as thinkers intellectuals we feel on the margins and that there's a certain factlessness about our own.
What's the clarification of complex issues in the political sphere.
Well let me go back to to a high-deco home we have mentioned before.
He once said and I thought this was a wonderful sentence he said questioning is the piety of thinking that is if we really ask ourselves what's the point of why why is thinking important as philosophical thinking.
suggest that it consists in this asking of questions and in the realization
that we don't necessarily have an answer in remaining within the question as
something questionable right and I think Wittgenstein has something similar to
offer. He at some point said, it should be possible to write a book of philosophy
consisting of nothing but questions right? It has no answer at all. It only has
these questions and it leaves the questions there and it leaves you to
grapple with these questions. So I sometimes say to my students what you
should realize is that philosophy is not systematic theorizing what it has
contributed to human knowledge is the question mark. And it is true of
course that in politics we ask questions all the time but we are also always
full of convictions which we can't really back up and which we fight for quite
irrationally against all good questioning and so the philosophy providing us
with this questioning spirit does something absolutely central not only to
politics but to human life I think that's what it does right? No I hear
your hands and I'm a little conflicted because I understand the piety of
thought being in questioning and I understand that I would not never
myself read a book of philosophy that's only questions and in fact when I
when I breed sometimes philosophers who start multiplying question after
question after question I I lose my patience I actually like it when or I
believe philosophy is under an obligation to posit and to affirm and to take a
stance because otherwise you are like Hegel's skeptic as he says in the
preface of the terminology of spirit that the skeptic or we could say the
questioner if all if we conceive of the vocation of philosophy only as a
questioning then it always then it has to have something to question therefore
it's parasitical of that which it's questioning and it as Hegel says skepticism is
the result of maybe some dogmatic assertions and I'm not sure that we can do
without not a dogmatic philosophy but something that Wittgenstein
associated with what he called faith as opposed to wisdom something that has a
fervent commitment or what your colleague at Berkeley Bert Dreyfuss when he was
speaking about you know the internet and any and invoking Kierkegaard's notion
of an infinite passion if we do not have an infinite passion or an unconditional
commitment to something a principle or a faith or a belief or some
call it even a dogma then our questioning will just be nothing but an endless
kind of bad infinity in the Hegelian sense that's what I worry about if we
reduce philosophy only to the act of questioning you see I don't know if that
well I maybe I'm less skeptical about skepticism than you or my colleague
Bert Dreyfuss I think we have as human beings we have such a tendency to believe
things to be dogmatic about things to be completely convinced that philosophy this
skeptical questioning as an antidote is an important contribution that
philosophy makes to human life I would also say it is the
Socratic contribution to human life in my Cambridge companion in the
introductory essay I end up comparing Wittgenstein to Socrates and I
think that's how you should read him I know that I know nothing but I'm
questioning myself and others and of course in this process hopefully truth will
emerge but the truth will be subjected to new questioning and we don't
kind of want to and should not want to shut this off too early oh no no I
I think it needs to go on in a very vigorous and healthy manner but at the
same time if Plato had not posited certain truths that have that are in need of
question for example a equating beauty with truth and truth with goodness and
or saying of positing some kind of ideal beauty of world of forms and so
forth and our questioning will dry up very quickly if it feeds only on its
own questioning so I think philosophy needs both the that spirit of
skepticism as well as the the spirit of taking the risk of committing
of embracing some kind of faith in the secular sense of of a faith existential
commitment yeah so to get back to Wittgenstein I would say that one I mean
there are many controversies around the question how to read them and he's
read in many different ways but one one line of course is to read him as a
skeptic essentially that's what what has been contribution to philosophies he
tears down rather establishes anything and even the thesis that meaning is
use is not a theory it's a kind of a destruction of the attempt to say what
meaning really is because uses come in so many different ways there's really no
way in which we can spell it out in advance but there are others who find that
he is after all advancing some positive view and they want to kind of extract
certainly there seems evident in the talk titles but even in the
investigations were can set out and try to extract a theoretical
substructure and so there are writings of Wittgenstein which try to
reconstruct and systematize the view of language meaning life
the mind that that he advances so I'd so he the texts are very elusive at
times as you know right there but he puts things before us and often he leaves it to
us to kind of make our mind how we are supposed to respond at this point
and so they open themselves up to to more than one reading and we need to
kind of of course battle this out right now
now I agree with you there and then that one statement of his which I quoted
that philosophy needs to return to the center around which our needs
revolve that opens up the question of what are our needs and
and our needs are and now we're going back to the first question with which we
opened our show namely how do things stand in the in the
historicist reading of Wittgenstein our needs as you point out historically
evolve they change and we always have to be able to identify what is the
need of the moment of our of our world at present and that philosophy has to
respond to that and now as I agree with you we're we're in our greatest need
is something that falls loosely under this this word the political which
in our the next installment that we're going to do on your on your book the
political and the search for the common good that we're going to ask
what exactly does the political mean what is a common good
and we're going to do it in a spirit of questioning but without forgetting the
fact that there are real needs here that are beyond just language games in
in the kind of demodics sense of games though that we're doing more than just
playing around so I certainly think that Wittgenstein never really becomes
historical historically oriented thinker in the way in which
Heidegger for instance did on Nietzsche and many others and but he thought
about this question of history certainly so he's he starts off as I suggested at
the beginning in a in a strictly anti-historical stance and then he
modifies this and opens himself up to he but he doesn't become a
historicist I I'm a historicist I think he has our needs and problems the
fundamental problems change over time I think his work
relies much more on the idea that they are certain stable set permanent
questions about the mind-body problem let's say which always come back and
which we then need to always to think about so so there I go beyond him
definitely right and open myself up to a more
varying an open-ended view of what philosophy is or should be
that's what makes your book on Wittgenstein so special which I highly
recommend all our listeners just called Wittgenstein
by Hans Slougas so I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with
Professor Hans Slougas from the University of Berkeley and that this is
the first of two shows it's going to be followed up with a discussion of his
more recent book published in 2014 called Politics or the Search for the
Common Good and the Search for the Common Good
I am not my title the the publisher wanted it was that right Cambridge
University Press wanted it title well it's it works it works it
is a good title and it attracts a lot of attention and it's been getting a
lot of attention so we're definitely looking forward to having you on very very
shortly Hans for a follow-up discussion on that I want to remind our
listeners that this is Robert Pocherson for entitled opinions and that we're
going to be with you next week thanks again for coming on Hans thank you
- I feel good.
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Hm.
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